"Bang! Bang! Youíre dead."
If youíre a male over the age of, say, 35, you said
that a lot when you were a boy. Armed with anything from a stick to a cap
pistol or simply your hand with thumb up and index finger out, you were
a cop or a cowboy or an army man. And today you are probably not in prison,
nor do you beat your wife or your children nor even do you torture small
animals.
But children nowadays are discouraged, both by society
and their parents, from using their imaginations to become Eliot Ness,
Wyatt Earp or Sgt. Fury. Just try and find in a store that sine qua
non of boyhood, a twin-rig holster set with a pair of shiny, silvery
cap guns.
My pal Shafer claims he was the best cap-shooter
in our neighborhood. Heís dreaming. On his best day, heíd still be reaching
for his iron while my Mattel Fanner 50, its barrel smoking, had already
ejected half a roll of perforated caps out its side-slot.
And Iím not, nor have I ever been in prison. Nor
do small animals run from my sight.
Shafer says his favorite cowboy was Alan Laddís
"Shane." Thatís why his record in our epic duels was similar to anyone
who wore a black hat in a Roy Rogers movie. Shane was an excellent character,
of course, but he had just the one movie and, in the days before cable
and VCRís, you could only see him once in a while.
My guy was on every Saturday, and not only could
he shoot Ė he flew his own plane. A twin-engine Cessna named Songbird.
Yup, "out of the clear blue of the western sky, comes Sky King!"
Someday, archaeologists will pinpoint the beginning
of the end for American civilization as the period of time when shows like
Sky King were replaced by shows like Barney the Dinosaur.
And Sky Kingís niece, Penny? Ooh la la. My heart
still flutters at her memory. You can keep your Annette Funicello. Sure,
Penny was later replaced in my affections by Marcia Brady and Laurie Partridge,
but the fleeting nature of childhood crushes is a subject for another column.
Besides, you never forget your first.
Iíve been thinking about all this stuff because Iíve
been shopping for cap guns. Christmas is coming up, and there are a couple
of little tykes I think should find a holster set underneath their trees.
Naively, I tried the toy stores. If you can find cap guns at all, theyíre
junky little plastic orange things. And good luck finding caps.
My search is now being conducted on eBay and cruising
neighborhood tag sales. My old Fanner 50's would fetch a hundred bucks.
Apiece. In mint condition, they would be worth more than my Hank Aaron
baseball card if I still had it. Or at least what Hank would have been
worth if he hadnít been stuck in the spokes of my bike to make it sound
like a motorcycle.
I suppose there are several reasons why kids donít
play soldier or cowboy anymore. Their fathers arenít likely to be war veterans
the way our dads were. And there arenít any modern-day equivalents of Roy
Rogers, the Lone Ranger, Sergeant Saunders or even John Wayne.
And thereís this thing about violence. Itís hard
to figure why the same parent who wouldnít be caught dead letting a son
or daughter have a toy gun will spend $300 on a video game set which will
allow the kid to decimate entire cities in 3-D living color.
What is being overlooked is that those childhood
heroes of ours werenít really about violence, they were about right and
wrong. Good versus evil. The characters were about character. I remember
one Sky King episode where he protected a group of Chinese immigrants who
were getting beaten up because they were, well, Chinese.
Roy Rogers wouldnít have been Roy Rogers without
his six-gun. For that matter, where would Luke Skywalker be without his
light saber? There is a lot of talk these days about the gratuitous violence
being fed to our children by the media. The "gratuitous" is the part about
which we should be concerned.
Children should learn there are causes out there
worth fighting for. The way of the world is that evil is usually vanquished
by force. The United States Army has saved our country more than has the
United States State Department.
Or maybe itís not that deep. Maybe itís just evolution,
and cap guns have gone the way of hula hoops and marbles. But history and
scarcity be damned, the little kids on my shopping list are going to learn
the fast-draw.
And in doing so, they will fire not only their cap
pistols, but their imaginations. Thereís nothing wrong with playing the
hero.